Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the world's first chip to use Samsung's APV codec

Qualcomm recently introduced its latest top-tier chips, with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 being the most advanced smartphone processor they've made so far. This chip will be used in the upcoming Galaxy S26 series next year. In addition to being powerful, it is also the first chip in the world to support Samsung's APV video codec, which is designed to compete with Apple's ProRes codec.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has built-in support for the APV codec.
APV is a new video coding format created by Samsung in 2023. It is the first smartphone chip to support APV through hardware, which means it can handle the codec efficiently. APV is a free-to-use video format that allows users to record high-quality cinematic videos on their phones and also helps in editing videos after they are captured.

APV supports only intra-frame coding, which means each frame is encoded individually.
It can handle multi-view videos, HDR10+ support, and even 8K resolution. It also supports various levels of chroma subsampling like 4:0:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4, and 4:4:4:4, as well as bit depths from 10-bit to 16-bit.

The timing of this announcement is also good because Google has started supporting the APV codec, and it's now part of Android 16.
Samsung is likely to include the APV codec in the Galaxy S26 series soon. The APV codec has been approved by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a standard.

It is supported by major companies like Adobe, Android, ArcSoft, Blackmagic Design (DaVinci Resolve), Company 3, Dolby, and YouTube.
With this support, we can expect a growing ecosystem around videos recorded using the APV codec.